Librarian Exploring the Future

Tag Archives: cats

Those of us in Library Land know how to track down quotes and texts and books and even images to a certain degree. But when it comes to memes, it’s substantially more challenging.

In some cases other people have already done the work for you, like the awesome people at “Know Your Meme.” But sometimes there isn’t a catchy moniker for your meme yet, or if there is, it be one that you don’t know yet.

But you start to see these images, and they just keep coming out. So, lots of people have seen grumpy cat springing up lately. He’s been telling people No, Bah Humbugging the holidays, refusing to take part in creation, and today someone put a towel on his head to make him look like a certain sci-fi emperor. As you can see from the link there, we have a full identity and ownership of who has the grumpy cat and takes these pictures of him.

But grumpy cat isn’t my favorite.

My favorite internet cat is this little guy over there on the right. So far, I don’t think he has an identity or internet history. I’ve looked through “know your meme” and poked through places where I found this picture, but no dice. I’m basically just calling him “Fabulous Cat” because this particular two part picture series was the first instance in which I saw him.

Fabulous cat has very distinctive eyes, jowls, and fur coloration on his head. I can’t even figure out what breed this must be, but god help me he’s just too amazingly cute for me to contain myself. Especially when he puts on those Jackie O sunglasses.

There are two moretwo panel memes of this cat that I must share to round out the evidence.

What you can tell from these images is that this is all the same cat. It has the same eyes, jowls, and head coloration with that white stripe down in between the two ginger patches, where the ginger over the right eye goes farther down the face than it does on the left. There is a unique fade pattern over the left eye as well.

But what we don’t know is where these images are coming from. The problem with meme research is that everyone and their brother posts these pictures and so tracing the origin point is like trying to trace your way back to the root of a fractal.

A lot of cat pictures have origins on forums like Reddit or 4Chan. Once the original pictures find their way online the memes just start rolling out from random creators.

This leads to the second problem with researching memes. These pictures are edited to add macro text. And in doing so they lose all of the EXIF data. Whenever you take a digital photo that photo also has a ton of data encoded with it. So when you upload it to the internet, a lot of that data trail (like the type of camera used, date, time and if available geospatial location where it was taken) just follows the picture into the internet. And if the picture were in that raw state we could theoretically open it up and take a look at that data. However, because these photos are edited, and repackaged, all of that important researchable, backtrackable data is wiped out.

So, I don’t really have an answer as to how to do this yet. I’m going to poke around for a while, try and find more pictures and data on Mr. Fabulous Cat and let you know what happens. If you have any additional macros of Fabulous Cat, please share them. Or if you have a lead on where Fabulous Cat may have come from, do let me know. Because I want to know. Primarily because I want to see more pictures of Fabulous Cat.Update: Within one minute of posting this piece, on my Facebook I got a link from a friend who immediately sent me this link to Catsparella, identifying the cat as Snoopy. So, I guess the answer to finding data about memes is through lazywebs. Social searching to the rescue. Thanks John.